Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge

The northern end of the Everglades is a short drive from the Folly.  The Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge covers nearly 150,000 acres.

There's usually a gator around.

But I'd never seen deer before.  They're much healthier looking here than in the Pines. More skittish, too.  

I've already become blasé about big wading birds like great blue herons.

Much more exciting to spot this unusual couple sharing a half-submerged log:  a snowy egret and a peninsula cooter.

Encroaching agriculture threatens what Marjorie Stoneman Douglas called the slow moving "river of grass."

I didn't have to look far to see the evidence.

Fleischman Is In Trouble (4*)

A "he said, she said" marriage story told from a knock-out feminist perspective.  The last 40 pages is a cri de coeur that every guy who believes he's a good husband should read before telling his wife.  Taffy Brodesser-Akner' novel reminded me of the women's lib novels I inhaled in the late 70s but with a modernist twist.

The Sheltering Sky (4*)

Whenever I travel, I try to read a novel written by a local or at least set in the country.  So it was with considerable dismay that I read Paul Bowles' disclaimer.  "Because the journey in the book was to start in Ouehrane (Oran, Algeria), I moved the hotel from Fez to that city. At no point did the protagonists’ itinerary take them to Morocco.”  You could have fooled me!  Existentialism isn't really my thing, but this went down pretty easy, much easier than Bernardo Bertolucci's film which I made the mistake of watching a few nights later, completely forgetting that I'd seen it before.

“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.” 

Riverbend Park

Chris and I drove to Jupiter to explore Riverbend Park. The hiking trail that runs from Lake Okeechobee to Home Sound passes through it.

The scarcity of wildlife--even birds--was disappointing, especially as we'd spotted an armadillo at Winding Waters Natural Area a week earlier.

Wynwood Waaaaaaah!

We took Randy to Wynwood Walls after Vizcaya.  He hated it.

After four visits over the past five years, I've lost my enthusiasm.  Still lots to see, but it's a mob scene overbuilt with ugly new condos and restaurant after restaurant, many empty.

"Peace."  Can you find the parking meter?

El Mac's mural extends over two buildings.

Everyone agreed this wall most resembled actual art (vs. illustration), although I suspect it may have been computer-generated.

Tristan Eaton captures the female gaze.

Painted, not crated.

Tickle those ivories, Ray.

Side view of some thick art.

A shark added sculpture to the gallery mix.

This piece is quilted.

You can't actually lick Aladdin Sane  (but Mike Garson can tickle those ivories, too!).

Randy spotted a random toy.

I think this canvas may still be in operation as a concrete plant.

 

No, Christine did not win an award.  Nor did the restaurant, Stiltsville Fish Bar.  Service with an attitude, ridiculous cocktail glasses and highly overrated food.

There Must Have Been Gondolas

Even though I'd been to Vizcaya before--for Miami's White Party, during my circuit senior days--its daytime beauty stunned me.  I guess I must have been more focused on other things.

Owner James Deering funded the vision of Paul Chalfin, his interior decorator, with family money from the International Harvester fortune.   A pronounced fondness for sculpted male nudity suggests the ghosts of this rumored couple enjoyed the flesh-and-blood shenanigans I witnessed in the garden during my first visit.

Imagine throwing a party in this atrium, which first welcomed guests in the 1920s.  Silent-film star Lillian Gish ("Birth of a Nation," the racist classic) was among them.  She brushed past me once when the Film Society of Lincoln Center honored Claudette Colbert in 1984.

A shot of Christine from the balcony, still hung with Christmas garlands.

A view of the villa as it appears from a gazebo on Biscayne Bay.

Chris, Thom & Randy on the steps.

Here's John Singer Sargent's portrait of the master of the house.  It hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The over-the-top furnishings are original.

 

I love this rug.

Thom couldn't believe the size of the second-floor kitchen.

So many gorgeous details.

The stone barge in front of the villa and the Venetian bridge beggar belief.  So camp!

There must have been gondolas once to ferry guests to the barge.

Chris peeking out from the gazebo.

The view of the barge from the gazebo.

The entrance to the garden, designed by Diego Suarez, a Colombian landscape architect. It's enormous and every bit as impressive as the villa.

Spooky, too.

This we can reproduce at the Folly!

Not one but two grottos.